Mike Vernal, one of Facebook’s top executives, is leaving the company to join Sequoia Capital to be the firm’s newest partner.

Facebook's Search, Local, and Developer Products executive has been serving the social media giant for eight years now. As head of search, Vernal’s responsibility was to overlook one of the big efforts on Facebook's 10-year road map, which will pit the company against search superpower Google. Before joining Facebook, Vernal spent nearly six years at Microsoft, as product manager first and development lead later on.

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The company said it does not plan to replace Vernal, and the product teams will continue to be run by their individual leaders. In addition, Facebook mentioned that he has been an integral part of the team and they are happy to see him climb another step in his career.

The former Facebook executive contributes to Facebook’s efforts to turn its search function into more of a resource for people to find public posts about current events, instead of just a place to find friends’ profiles. Leaving the company came after Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Francisco that discussed the company’s 10-year vision, chat bots, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Vernal will now join 10 other partners in Sequoia’s Menlo Park office. Vernal is the first partner added since the departure of Michael Goguen, a longtime partner who left last month following a lawsuit filed by a former exotic dancer alleging abuse and breach of contract.

“You don’t recruit people like Mike. They choose you. His experience scaling engineering, product and design teams at Facebook will be invaluable to Sequoia founders working to build similarly transformative companies,” said Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier.

Vernal will start working at Sequoia in May with founders across a broad range of start-up companies, with a focus on consumer and developer tech.

TagsFacebook, Mike Vernal, Sequoia Capital, social media, Facebook’s annual developer conference